Forget Technical Terms - Whoever Gets the Most Developers Wins...Period

Forget Technical Terms - Whoever Gets the Most Developers Wins...Period

In a recent survey by Evans Data, Google gets accolades for its public cloud. IBM gets top marks from developers for its private cloud.

But what do developers want the most? They want the cloud to be simple to use. They want it to be as as easy to get your data in as easy it is to get the data out. And they want it to be secure.

Evans Data survey took a look at the whole gamut of issues related to cloud computing in an annual survey, and its conclusions focus on the dichotomies between private and public clouds.

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Google and IBM share a common denominator. Both apply the basic principles of open source to their cloud computing efforts. That makes it easy for developers to work with the platforms.

This brings up a certain issue we have with the terms used for cloud computing. It does not matter if one cloud is public and another is private. It's about getting the most developers. To do that you need to open up. Period.

ReadWriteWeb views cloud computing as a network of platforms that serve as individual ecosystems. In the Future of the Cloud, we discard the notion of public and private clouds to focus more on emerging platforms.

From the report by Mike Kirkwood:

"As an industry, we are emerging from a phase of infrastructure cloud computing that has been driven by server virtualization and scaling compute. Now we are moving to the next phase of cloud platforms where higher order jobs such as collaboration and communication services are the drivers. In this phase the action will be in how the cloud scales the work done by people, and in how an always-on, always-available infrastructure supports applications that both cut expense and generate revenue.

It's in this phase that we'll discard our previous categorization of IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, and private, hybrid, and public types of clouds, and instead focus on platforms that extend end-to-end and enable emerging ecosystems. The foundation of the emerging ecosystem is based upon the following.."

Google is attracting developers as well as any cloud provider. The proof is in the API calls it gets. According to Programmable Web, Google is tops in the API billionaire's club.

IBM is developing an ecosystem that includes RightScale and Kaavo for deploying applications and workloads. Navajo Systems provides an additional layer of security. Silanis is used for e-signatures. VMLogix allows for manual, functional, and compatibility testing. AppFirst provides performance monitoring. And SOASTA CloudTest helps deliver load and performance testing.

Forget the technical terms. They will go away. The ideas are what matters, and those ideas will drive the innovation. Ideas are what excites developers.

What also matters are the people: attract developers through what you provide them, not by bandying about terms that in the long run no one really cares about.

But not everyone agrees. We asked on Twitter what people thought of technical terms like IaaS and PaaS.

Eric Delattre said cloud is actually the term that needs to go:

"@alexwilliams @rww the opposite, use IaaS, PaaS, SaaS instead of Cloud!"